August 27, 2013

Reports here and here. Like I said before, East Asians don't feel disgust very strongly, and that removes one of the most powerful checks on sick and immoral behavior.

This isn't serial killer stuff, where the criminal is obviously fucked in the head. It's just some enterprising middleman who's simply doing his best for the greater good by raising the supply for a high-demand commodity. If that commodity happens to be human corneas, and if that means he has to gouge out the eyes of a 6 year-old child after drugging him out, leaving him for dead afterward, well, y'know...

It take tough person to survive in China! No eye build strong character! In fact, YOU pay ME for make your kid so strong!Re-reading the report, it turns out the criminal was probably a woman. Newsflash / reminder to all you chink-loving HBD nerds out there and your fantasies about sweet, feminine Asian women (LOL).As for the kid who sold his own kidney, notice the hard-luck story about how "The teen was from Anhui, one of China's poorest provinces, where inhabitants frequently leave to find work and a better life elsewhere." Poor baby, had to suffer the disgrace of not being able to diddle an iPhone and an iPad in public. But, y'know...Apple very prestigious in China! No have Apple toy, very shameful! Dishonor family spirit! I make sacrifice to please ancestor -- unlike selfish American!The notion that we have anything to learn from this irreparably rotten race is one of the most bizarre mass delusions in human history. China has always been a miserable shit-hole, and will stay that way. The only relationship we ought to have with it is one of quarantine.

26 comments:

Marco Polo didn't think China was a shit hole. The west borrowed a lot of inventions from the Chinese. A few anecdotes don't suffice to make the place worse. My understanding is that kids still get killed at a higher rate over here, to say nothing of how dangerous south asia can be.

Since 1300? Anyway, fancy gadgets don't make up for morally empty minds, grimy living conditions (that is, for everyone who wasn't an emperor), poor nutrition, utter lack of culture whether high or folk, godlessness (not holding anything sacred), and so on.

"My understanding is that kids still get killed at a higher rate over here"

Well I guess that undoes the fact that they get their eyes gouged out by organ traffickers over there, or run over repeatedly while none of the many bystanders do anything to help a dead baby lying in the street.

In the grand utilitarian calculus, death = death, harm = harm, etc. So you'd react the same to your 6 year-old kid getting shot by another kid as you would to them being drugged out by an organ trafficker, had their eyes gouged out, the eyeballs left in the alley with the corneas removed, and your kid left for dead with blood streaming all over his face?

Sure they do, that's the whole point of statistics and probability. Such gruesome things never happen in America -- ever. They do happen in China, with appalling regularity. Although representing extreme draws from the tails of a distribution, they nevertheless allow us to work our way back to the average. Hence, the Chinese average for gruesome callousness is much higher than it is in America.

The Crow Creek Massacre is just one of a handful of "anecdotes" about life in pre-Columbian America. Guess that's enough to wave off skepticism about how gentle the Amerindians were.

You only need to be morally tested once in your lifetime for your true, hidden nature to be revealed.

Agnostic, write something about India. It's a large and important enough country that it deserves its own post. You've covered it briefly a few times, but I'd be interested in seeing you give a detailed analysis of that nation.

The quantity of death is relevant. And between death and severe injury (even of the crippling sort), most would prefer severe injury (though to argue against myself, Tina Nash said she only went on living after being gouged because of her kids). If you want to add disgust onto it, there's always rape+murder which again I'm pretty sure we have more of over here.

The point of statistics is not to rely on anecdotes. It's common to drop outliers as noise.

China didn't have an absence of high culture, it has a tradition of writing, music and artwork. It is true they were poorer on average than the English were at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Per Greg Clark, that's because the filthiness of the English (China managed waste better) meant disease kept their numbers down rather than Malthusian starvation. Like William McNeill, I think relaxed selection for disease resistance (rather than more behavioral traits) has a positive effect the development of a society.

I think Amerindians were violent not due to one incident (even one of mass murder) but multiple ones. I think they were violent because anthropologists have calculated the expected fraction of males who will die violently to be higher than most societies today. If I relied on anecdotes then I might think Anders Breivik showed Norway to be fantastically murderous.

Don't try to analyze it -- just tell me what your gut says. That the stories I linked to a sick, twisted, and degrading, or confess that you yourself have a blunted sense of disgust and identify more with the Chinese. It's a no-brainer.

Gruesome callousness is not an outlier in China, unless you think they all share in a spirit of charity and fellow-feeling when nobody's looking. Again, a no-brainer. One of the most ruthless, amoral, dog-eat-dog societies on earth -- and always has been.

"it has a tradition of writing, music and artwork"

Read Human Accomplishment and see how staggering it is. There's not even that much when you restrict the countries to just East Asia. Throw in Europe and western Asia, and it's invisible.

Again, feel free to start naming names. You know we'd all recognize the Buddha, either the Gita or the Ramayana, or other things from Indo-European cultures far away. Who's the Chinese Shakespeare or Michelangelo? (Rhetorical question: no real answer.)

"I think relaxed selection for disease resistance (rather than more behavioral traits) has a positive effect the development of a society."

Again you're speaking hypothetically. In real life, where would you and everyone else rather live -- in East Asia or Western Europe? Relaxed selection for disease resistance couldn't have been all you're cracking it up to be.

"I think Amerindians were violent not due to one incident (even one of mass murder) but multiple ones."

Right, just like multiple examples from China *just within the past year or two*.

"If I relied on anecdotes then I might think Anders Breivik showed Norway to be fantastically murderous."

You can't focus on anything qualitative. Nobody said anything about the Chinese being more murderous, but more gruesomely callous. You could definitely say that for Norway compared to Spain or Italy. Or whatever phrase you want to use -- that sort of cosplay nerd avenger stock type doesn't exist down there. (And they have larger populations than Norway, so if the prevalence were equal, they'd have a higher count.)

It all depends on what you're trying to say, whether an even counts as an outlier, an anecdote, or sufficient evidence.

"Per Greg Clark, that's because the filthiness of the English (China managed waste better) meant disease kept their numbers down rather than Malthusian starvation."

Greg Clark doesn't know much about China or Asia. Read Ron Paul's characterization of the selection pressures in China. Miserable living conditions are more than just having human waste in the house -- it's the whole urban hell-hole ecosystem, especially having a high population density where folks are packed in like sardines. It's just off-putting.

Chinese have lived in way higher-density areas than the more spread-out Europeans, thanks to less agrarian and more pastoralist living in Europe. Freedom to roam, you know? Sardine living is miserable living.

The notion that we have anything to learn from this irreparably rotten race is one of the most bizarre mass delusions in human history. China has always been a miserable shit-hole, and will stay that way.

There's a lot to learn from at least individual Chinese persons (Steve Hsu etc), in the realm of science, technology, kung fu, cuisine. Historically, living conditions weren't necessarily grimy, there are estimates of similar per capita living conditions in China and Europe (comparing the whole of each region, and all the subregions) prior to the industrial revolution.

Any other ethnic groups linked to organ theft that we can on this basis dismiss as "rotten races"? Checking around on it, there are links to pastoralist desert Bedouin people seem to, Jews and Eastern Europeans as well.

India seems to stand out as well as an organ theft region. Are they are rotten race?

Anonymous said, "Ron Unz is full of shit on most things though. He's constantly being debunked by folks like Andrew Gelman and Greg Cochran on just about everything."

This jumps out at me because one thing happens to link all three of these names and I'm unaware of anything else that does: Unz's article that Jews were overrepresented at the Ivies and academic performance or intelligence didn't explain it. Gelman (Journolist*) heavily criticized it while Cochran (definitely not a Journolist contributer) devoted a couple of sentences criticizing the methodology.

Still laughing, by the way, at the thought of seeing Unz read Agnostics thoughts on the Chinese; would love to be a fly on the wall for that :)The posts are brutal, and I feel so guilty for laughing, but it's all because of Unz.

*Never forget. One of the slimiest, most low-down political episodes in my lifetime.

Ron Unz is a complete fool, and it seems so are you. There is no evidence that China faced malthusian living conditions until the 18th century, well into the Qing Dynasty - - Guangdong Province, for instance, was not even colonized by the Han ethnic group until the Tang Dynasty, and was so sparsely populated that it was relegated as an exile location for court officials who displeased the emperor.

As for China lacking high culture, you are talking out of your rear end again, as usual. You must certainly aren't the first half-breed to despise one portion of his ancestry (while idolizing the other), nor will you be the last.

Analyzing things instead of going with our gut is what puts humans above animals. The gut cannot comprehend statistics, it errs systematically because "system 1" relies on heuristics. These heuristics can work in many cases where quick, dirty & easy sufficies, but fails for problems our ancestors didn't face that often, such as those of a statistical nature.

I don't make claims about what artwork is staggering, the claim was about whether it had no culture, high or low. That might be true of Sparta, it's clearly not true of China.

Regarding names, for religious founders there's Lao Tse, with Confucius kind of a gray area (it matters how much importance one puts on orthopraxy vs orthodoxy). As an atheist, I'd say Europe can take pride in not originating such things. Their most notable books are probably "The Art of War" and "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", although if we were including more of east asia "The Tale of Genji" must be noted as the first novel. I've heard of some modern Chinese artists, but can't name any pre-modern ones, just as is the case for all of the non-European world.

Right now I prefer living in most western countries due to the much higher per capita GDP. But if I set aside stuff like language or other things tying me to the U.S, Singapore seems like possibly the best place in the world. Hong Kong may be in the running, I'm not entirely certain how much has changed since it rejoined China, although my expectations from the 90s that it would go down the tubes like other former colonies turned out quite wrong.

I find a homicide rate in Norway of 0.6, while Italy has 0.9 and Spain has 0.8. So Norway is least murderous even if they produced a superlative mass murderer. La Griffe's "method of thresholds" works better on approximately normal distributions with very large annual data. Before Breivik who would have associated Norway with mass murder?

I focus on homicide because it's a pretty extreme outcome relative to most of our lives, and we tend to have decent data on it. I don't know what kind of data you'd want to use for callousness, maybe some cross-cultural experiments by social psychologists? There's also the world values survey, but I haven't investigated which questions measure "callousness".

Ron Unz is interesting (though often wrong), but I think I'd weight Clark's book more heavily than something Unz wrote as a freshman. I've noted before that Unz' description sounds positively "progressive" to me in an evolutionary sense, and that's the core difference which would ensure I can never be a political lefty!

China has been for most of its history mostly rural, and I believe it's still substantially less urban than the west. In the pre-modern (Malthusian) era, population expands to carrying capacity, and the Chinese were either better at intensive development or lucked into some very productive land (the same may be true of Bangladesh). Is dense living miserable? Real estate prices in Manhattan, as well as Singapore, suggest that is not at all the case.

What struck me about downtown Hong Kong was how ugly everything was. Also very poor visibility due to pollution. Fecal smell ever present. I had just been in Sweden for a few months. I won't bother to talk about the massive contrasts and it can't be all attributed to population density.

Sure they do, that's the whole point of statistics and probability. Such gruesome things never happen in America -- ever.

I don't know. There's usually some extremely gruesome story that pops up in the news every few years involving a homegrown necrophiliac/cannibal/killer etc.

Last year, there was that guy Luka Magnotta who uploaded a video of him killing and dismembering some guy and committing necrophilia and cannibalism. He also mailed out the body parts to random people.

A few years back there was that pig farmer Robert Pickton who got caught after butchering many women. He would hang them on meathooks on his farm.

Most of them are forgotten but the more famous ones are usually remembered for a while. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, who would do things like drill holes into a person's head while they were still alive and pour acid in the holes. Ed Gein was another famous one. He was infamous for collecting body parts and making furniture, accessories, etc. out of body parts from people he killed.